Hedwig Gorski

Hedwig Irene Gorski (born July 18, 1949) is an American performance poet and an avant-garde artist who labels her aesthetic as "American futurism."

The term "performance poetry," a precursor to slam poetry, is attributed to her.

Her father joined the Polish Underground when aged fourteen, and later the United States Army, arriving with his family in the U.S. in 1949 on the General Sturgis, which docked in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Her father did electrical work in Napoleonville before moving to New Jersey.

Her public career began in New Orleans during 1973, illustrating for the infamous NOLA Express underground newspaper and hawking the new issues on the corner.

The archives of NOLA Express are now housed in the University of Connecticut.

Gorski and Charles Bukowski are two of the most notable contributors to the NOLA Express.

There, she befriended Delta blues musician Babe Stovall and often kept him company while he performed for tourists in Jackson Square receiving tips into his open guitar case.

A video of them at New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival was made but lost.

Soon after moving to Austin, she divorced and began her poetry and theater careers in earnest by falling into the "[a]tmospheric landscape of the town that summoned and intoxicated so many beloved ... artists of the time toward intense self-actualization."

She completed, produced, and directed a one-act play script with the title Booby, Mama! that is an inventive form she named "neo-verse drama".

The art memoir of the production states that the verse play was based on a conceptual art cut-up form of writing made famous by William Burroughs.

After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Canada, she moved with her first husband to Austin, Texas in 1977.

She is married to her second husband, composer D'Jalma Garnier.

The memoir titled Intoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street details the events in 1978 that are described as the birth of performance poetry as an American regional avant-garde joining the activity of the body to the psychic power of utterance and intent.

"The conceptual process ... seems impossible to pull off. There was no money, and it used 'found' text and 'street' actors ... filled with existential angst living on the fringes of society."

She never claimed close ties to the feminist movement, but feminists reportedly consider her work to contain powerful statements about the disparity caused by race and gender in the United States.

The images in her poetry are womanly and challenge what is politically correct according to the feminist dictum of the time, and they reflect a protest against the complacency and inaction of artists and non-conformists.

She had close ties with Gloria E. Anzaldúa, whose book Borderlands/La Frontera is considered a major work in Chicana feminist theory, Ricardo Sánchez, and raúlrsalinas, often performing with them at Resistencia Bookstore and elsewhere.

It originated in press releases for experimental spoken word and conceptual theater Gorski created during 1979.

She is a first-generation Polish American academic scholar and accomplished creative writer.

The innovative poetry, prose, drama, and audio works are published and produced in a variety of media using standard and experimental forms.

A first-generation American citizen, born in Trenton, New Jersey, Gorski's parents and sister emigrated to the United States from Galicia, Poland (present-day Ukraine) following World War II, where two aunts and a grandmother were murdered by Ukrainian partisans.

The term was widely adopted to name the new genre by later practitioners in the mid-1980s, which is distinct within and parallel to the following practices: spoken word, slam, poetry readings, performed poetry, and performance art.

Gorski sees poets in American society as a disenfranchised minority group with a history of prosecution by the American government for obscenity when exercising the freedom of speech.

She was a founding writer for The Austin Chronicle in 1980 initiating and naming the Litera column that discussed readings, books, and other matters of importance related to non-mainstream, alternative, and small press literature, especially poetry.

After her career in performance poetry during the 1980s, Gorski entered graduate school in the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and was awarded a doctorate, Ph.D. in Creative Writing, in 2001.

She first coined the term "performance poetry" to name her style of writing poetry for oral presentation, instead of for print publication, in a 1981 press release.

"Experimental and avant-garde artists and poets were demonized during the early 1990s by the efforts of a conservative agenda to eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) during the late 1980s and to remove art studies from primary education."

She produced and funded projects to distribute works of performance-oriented literature outside the "mainstream".

She also promoted and nurtured literature opposed to the establishment.

In 2003–04, Gorski lectured on minority American literature at the University of Wrocław in Poland as a Fulbright Fellow and spent five months traveling to various locations, including Ukraine.

During the Annual Polish American Historical Association (PAHA) conference in Washington, D.C. in 2008, Gorski read from "Mexico Solo", a long prose poem that she used to introduce how Polish Americans are more closely related to all 'hyphenated' minority cultures than to the majority American WASP culture.

On the conference panel, Polish American poets Stephen Lewandowski and Joseph Lisowski discussed how blatant discrimination and negative stereotyping circulated by Polish jokes plagued their childhoods.

She calls these persecuted groups "invisible minorities" in the United States because they are often of European heritage.

Gorski's writing and career aligns with the struggles of all disadvantaged groups suffering from the hidden class warfare inside American society, and for this she has been called the "American Mayakovsky" from whom her motto "poetry is a hammer" is adapted.

When Bob Holman first heard an audio cassette of Gorski with East of Eden Band, he told New York poet Michael Vecchio that it was the best band he had heard.

Vecchio is one of those featured in the Poets Audio Anthology Project, Vol. II, along with Isabella Russell-Ides and many other performing poets Gorski collected and produced.

Jazz writers and radio programmers were intrigued with poetry and music collaboration, but few practitioners dedicated their careers to doing only oral poetry and music, as did Gorski.

Gorski has called herself a "performance poet" in press releases and interviews when describing what she did with East of Eden.